travel

Amazon today announced it’s expanding its travel site Amazon Destinations to reach several new markets across the U.S, representing a doubling of its footprint since its launch in April this year. There are now more than double the number of destinations available for booking on the service, which includes hundreds of hotels across 35 cities and 6 larger metro regions, the company notes. Read More

Microsoft may have sold off some of its mapping assets to Uber last week, but almost as if to show that it’s still taking Bing Maps seriously, the company today announced a new preview release of Bing Maps for the web. Read More

As the summer travel season goes into full swing, a travel app that hopes to give you a new way of experiencing physical spaces is growing. Detour — an immersive city guide app constructed around GPS-triggered audio and smart, witty narratives — is expanding beyond its existing footprint of San Francisco and Austin to cover New York and five international cities: Barcelona… Read More

As Airbnb continues to add more features to its online accommodation rental marketplace to meet demands both from regulators and its growing audience of hosts and guests, a startup in the same space but focusing exclusively on high-end properties has raised funding. Luxury Retreats, a Montreal-based marketplace for people to list and find super fancy homes for short-term rentals, has raised… Read More

The last few years have been a dizzying and heady time for travel startups, filled with mammoth funding rounds, high-profile acquisitions, and dramatic examples of young startups soaring past incumbents. Last year, Uber eclipsed Hertz and Avis after it raised money at an $18 billion valuation. The rapidly growing company then went on to raise another $1.6 billion at a $41 billion valuation as… Read More

Headout, a mobile travel application that functions as sort of a mobile concierge, helping you find tours, activities and tickets to local events in select U.S. cities, has closed on $1.8 million in seed funding in order to expand its business to new markets. Currently only live in New York and Los Angeles, the startup says it plans to utilize the funds to reach 12 more cities by… Read More

Amazon last night rolled out a new travel site it’s calling Amazon Destinations, which focuses on helping customers find “getaway destinations” within driving distance of their homes. Currently, Amazon Destinations features hotel selections in three U.S. metro areas: L.A., New York and Seattle, the company says.
This is not the first time that Amazon has dabbled in the… Read More

Wanderu, a travel startup that’s like a Kayak.com but for bus and train tickets instead of flights, is today making its service available for the first time as a mobile application. Launching first on iOS, the new app allows travelers to quickly find, price out, and then book tickets to their preferred destination, optionally saving their personal information along the way as well as… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

After buying Travelocity earlier this month for $280 million, Expedia continues its online travel acquisition spree. Today, the company announced an agreement to acquire Orbitz for $1.6 billion — or $12 per share — in cash, a premium of 29 percent on Orbitz’s current share price.
The deal speaks to ongoing consolidation in the market, but also Expedia’s bigger… Read More

A new travel technology company called HotelsByDay wants to offer a new option for those looking for a place to work or unwind during their trips, when they don’t need to book a full overnight stay at a hotel. As you may have guessed by the name, the company is attempting to break open a new category in lodging: hotel rooms you can book by the day, for roughly 40 percent less than… Read More

TripAdvisor, the travel planning and booking business, today announced the acquisition of a startup that it hopes will help build out its relationship with customers during and after their travels: it has bought ZeTrip and its “automatic” travel journal app Rove, which provides a travelog of your movements based on your GPS coordinates and other data. Terms of the deal were… Read More

A mobile application called Hopper, out today on iTunes, is using data and analysis from “billions” of flight prices in order to tell travelers when they should fly and buy tickets. The company claims that it’s able to save users as much as 40 percent on flights, and in 95 percent of cases will get you a cheaper flight or one that’s at least the same price as you would… Read More

Aoliday, a Shanghai-based travel site and mobile app that helps Chinese tourists arrange oversea trips, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Gobi Partners. This is Aoliday’s first round of investment and will be used to hire more employees, improve its offline services, and expand into new markets, founder and CEO James He told TechCrunch. Read More

Stayful, the travel site launched last year and founded by industry execs from Expedia and Hotels.com, has now gone mobile with today’s debut of an iOS application. The new app allows travelers to find the best rates at independent, boutique hotels across the U.S. including cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, L.A., San Francisco, Houston, Orlando, Miami, New Orleans, Savannah… Read More

Want to visit London, Paris, and Berlin, then blow off steam in Amsterdam? Expect a logistical nightmare trying to find the optimal route with the cheapest fights, trains, and hotels. Unless you use Vamo, a new multi-stop travel booking service from long-time Facebook engineer Ari Steinberg that launches in private beta today. Its hardcore algorithms crunch near-infinite trip permutations… Read More

Daily deals site Groupon says that travel is its fastest growing business category, and today it is launching a new mobile app that it hopes will help it capitalize on that more. Getaways by Groupon, a free app for iOS and Android, bypasses Groupon’s wider focus on local merchant deals to focus only on travel packages and hotels (25,000 offers listed right now), similar to the… Read More

Boston-based travel startup Wanderu, which aims to become something of a Kayak.com for booking bus and train tickets — a market that doesn’t yet have a leading aggregation site — has now raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Metamorphic Ventures, and was said to be over-subscribed. Also participating were Alta Ventures, Craig Lentzsch (former… Read More

A Durham, North Carolina-based startup called Hostel Rocket wants to make it easier for travelers who prefer the low-cost accommodations provided by hostels to find available rooms, view photos, descriptions, reviews and schedule bookings from either the web or their mobile phones. Though the startup only launched to the public this July, the site has already seen over a million visitors… Read More

A new mobile application called Tripcast, built by the team that created photo-sharing app Cluster, allows travelers to privately share their photos with their friends back home. The app lets you create a travel journal of sorts, by not only collecting the photos and sharing them, but also plotting them on map, and inviting fellow travelers to build albums with you.
This is not the first time… Read More